But she did not want to tell him that. She did not want to argue. Instead, she slid her hands along his waist and tipped her head down. She kissed him, stilling further protest. She had learned from him.
She felt him give in.
Elodie and the echoes of the dead had set them against each other, but she was stronger than he was. She could reorder their world and keep him safe. They did not need to build a new fiction together, for she could make reality.
She sank to her knees, and Augustine followed her. This was a man who could cut her open, who had nearly killed her in the cellar, and yet she felt a surge of desire despite it. No, because of it, because she could feel him growing helpless at her touch. She had mastered him from the first, had overwhelmed his objections, had brought his world crashing down around them, because in his heart he was hers.
Her hands went to his high-collared vest and worked free the buttons one by one. He gasped against her mouth, his hands on her hips, her thighs, then sliding up beneath her skirt. His surgeon’s calluses trailed along her calf and she shuddered, answering him with matched desire.
He was solid, real in a way that a ghost of him could never have been, real in a way that he had never been. Magic had created an impossible, infinitely minuscule gap between them, breaking trust and poisoning her desire, and now he had crossed it. He had come to her. She should have feared that he would turn on her again, and he should have hated her for sealing him into the crypt, but there was no pain in the way their breaths mingled, in the weight of his body as he bore her down to the study’s floor, in the tension in hers as she wrapped her legs around his hips.
They coupled like wild things despite their exhaustion, their hunger for food replaced with hunger for every inch of each other’s flesh. This was not the sweet yet fumbling first time in Augustine’s bed, but something else, something purer, something perfect. Jane never looked toward the door, or the window, focusing only on the scent of Augustine’s skin, the rasp of the starched collar of his shirt against her jawline when he leaned down to kiss her. She marked him with bruises and love bites.
She gave herself over to a focused kind of madness.
* * *
IN THE MORNING, Augustine was gone. The wall remained. The crypt was sealed.
Jane screamed until her throat began to bleed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
OUTSIDE LINDRIDGE HALL, the sun had risen.
Jane sat, her dress poorly fastened around the bulging of her belly, shivering in the middle of a circle. She had drawn it with desperate, shaking fingers, but it had come to life despite its wavering perimeter. She had repeated familiar invocations, and had cracked open a fresh hen’s egg, hoping against hope.
The yolk had been yellow and unbroken.
She didn’t know if that was because she had already worked the dawn ritual once already that day, or if it was because she had violated the dictums of chastity and sleep. It hardly mattered. She was fixed, instead, on the memory of how she had drawn the circle in the study, how she had built it up. How Augustine had stepped across it without issue, though Orren had not dared to try. Augustine had not flinched. He had not dissolved. He had come to her, and held her, and felt just as real as she did.
But Renton had felt real. So had Abigail. And she had challenged none but the first to cross a circle, taking it on faith that she had been right, that Elodie had helped her, that Orren had left her because she’d triumphed.
Augustine had crossed the circle. The crypt was sealed. An equation at its simplest, its solution plain:
A ghost could cross a circle. She had been wrong.
Augustine was dead.
She had failed.
What now?
Did she leave? Did she go to the magistrate and confess? But the crypt was sealed; there was no body. She was a poor liar, but she could play the grieving widow. The pain in her breast had fangs and claws, tearing at her lungs, her heart. She could go to Camhurst, go to the Cunninghams, find some way to earn her keep. Start over, keep her world small, the way she had lived her life before Augustine.
She didn’t want to leave.
She could start over. There wasn’t enough food to keep her for seven days, or enough wood to heat the house, or running water, or a hundred other things she would need, but she could leave now, could gather new supplies. Did she owe it to him, to keep going, to carry his body out? Or was she only being selfish, filled with desire for the impossible, drowning in shame and longing to fix her mistake?
A mistake. She’d made a mistake. Somewhere along the way, she had erred. Could she follow her path back to where it had all gone wrong, and find some way to change it, some variable to tweak? What if it had been not her assumptions that had failed her, but her own weakness? Her desire to touch him might have allowed him to reach her. She should have feared him, should have mistrusted him, should have believed with all her heart that he had been sent to torment her, and instead—instead—